Many of us looked to President Trump to right the glaring injustices of the Obama era.

But the months since his inauguration pass, and Hillary Clinton, whom everyone knows to be not just corrupt but felonious, is still not indicted.

And the Department of Justice has announced that Lois Lerner will not be prosecuted for the crimes everyone knows she committed.

President Trump himself is being investigated for obstruction of justice which everyone knows he is not guilty of. He could stop the stupid investigation into Russian connections he did not have and obstruction of justice suspicions that are unjustified, but he isn’t doing so.

Everyone knows that Obama obstructed justice and nobody is calling for his prosecution.

He it was who obstructed the justice that should have come down hard on Hillary Clinton.

On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference.

The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham.

Pundits and the Trump administration are shrieking because this indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed. It shows, they cry, that the fix was in! …

[But] this is not news.

No, but the letter provides proof of what everyone already knew.

Let’s think about what else was going on in April 2016. …

On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the criminal statutes relevant to her e-mail scandal). The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, its importance had been vastly overstated.

This is precisely the reasoning that Comey relied on in ultimately absolving Clinton. …

On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey publicly stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The director acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, it was just a small percentage of the emails involved.

Obama’s April statements are the significant ones. They told us how this was going to go. The rest is just details. In his April 10 comments, Obama made the obvious explicit: He did not want the certain Democratic nominee, the candidate he was backing to succeed him, to be indicted.

Conveniently, his remarks (inevitably echoed by Comey) did not mention that an intent to endanger national security was not an element of the criminal offenses Clinton was suspected of committing – in classic Obama fashion, he was urging her innocence of a strawman crime while dodging any discussion of the crimes she had actually committed.

As we also now know – but as Obama knew at the time – the president himself had communicated with Clinton over her non-secure, private communications system, using an alias. The Obama administration refused to disclose these several e-mail exchanges because they undoubtedly involve classified conversations between the president and his secretary of state.

It would not have been possible to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information without its being clear that President Obama had engaged in the same conduct. The administration was never, ever going to allow that to happen.

What else was going on in May 2016, while Comey was drafting his findings (even though several of the things he would purportedly “base” them on hadn’t actually happened yet)?

Well, … the Obama Justice Department was leaking to the Washington Post that Clinton probably would not be charged – and that her top aide, Cheryl Mills, was considered a cooperating witness rather than a co-conspirator.

Why? Well, I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but it turns out the Obama Justice Department had fully adopted the theory of the case announced by President Obama in April. The [Washington] Post explained that, according to its sources inside the investigation, there was “scant evidence tying Clinton to criminal wrongdoing” because there was “scant evidence that Clinton had malicious intent in the handling of e-mails”. Like Obama, the Post and its sources neglected to mention that Mrs. Clinton’s felonies did not require proof of “malicious intent” or any purpose to harm the United States – just that she willfully transmitted classified information, was grossly negligent in handling it, and withheld or destroyed government records. …

The Obama Justice Department was simultaneously barring the FBI from asking Mills questions that went to the heart of the e-mails investigation – questions about the process by which Clinton and her underlings decided which of her 60,000 e-mails to surrender to the State Department, and which would be withheld (it ended up being about 33,000) as purportedly “private” (a goodly percentage were not).

This was the start of a series of Justice Department shenanigans we would come to learn about: Cutting off key areas of inquiry; cutting inexplicable immunity deals; declining to use the grand jury to compel evidence; agreeing to limit searches of computers (in order to miss key time-frames when obstruction occurred); agreeing to destroy physical evidence (laptop computers); failing to charge and squeeze witnesses who made patently false statements; allowing subjects of the investigation to act as lawyers for other subjects of the investigation (in order to promote the charade that some evidence was off-limits due to the attorney-client privilege); and so on.

And never did a single Republican in Congress call for a special investigator into these despicable persons’ crimes and corruption.

The establishment Right does not know how to fight these political battles. Or it does not want to.

But once President Trump was elected, we looked to him and his Department of Justice under new management to apply the law and deliver actual justice.

There is a way – a notoriously aggressive way – that the Justice Department and FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case. Here, they were trying to unmake a case. …

The main issue is not that witnesses hadn’t been questioned; it is that by April 2016, restraints were already in place to ensure that witness interviews would be fruitless, and that any incriminating information they accidentally turned up would be ignored or buried.

The decision not to indict Hillary Clinton was not made by then-FBI Director Comey. It was made by President Obama and his Justice Department – Comey’s superiors.

If you want to say Comey went along for the ride rather than bucking the tide (as he concedes doing when Lynch directed him to call the Clinton probe a “matter,” not an “investigation”), that’s fair. But the fact that Comey already knew in April what he would say in July has long been perfectly obvious. The Obama administration was going to follow its leader. What Comey ultimately stated was just a repeat of what Obama was openly saying in April, and what Obama’s Justice Department was leaking to the press in May.

Bottom line: In April, President Obama and his Justice Department adopted a Hillary Clinton defense strategy of concocting a crime no one was claiming Clinton had committed: to wit, transmitting classified information with an intent to harm the United States.

With media-Democrat complex help, they peddled the narrative that she could not be convicted absent this “malicious intent”, in a desperate effort to make the publicly known evidence seem weak. Meanwhile, they quietly hamstrung FBI case investigators in order to frustrate the evidence-gathering process. … It was not Comey’s plan. It was Obama’s plan.

So now, in the United States of America, the law is not applied equally to all.

Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee [have] drafted a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein … asking them to appoint a second special counsel to investigate the 2016 elections. …

(Robert Mueller being the first “Special Counsel, appointed to look into the non-existent crime, alleged by the Democrats, of “collusion” between President Trump and President Putin.)

The letter lists 14 specific inquiries the congressmen would like this potential second special counsel to look into:

Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch directing Mr. Comey to mislead the American people on the nature of the Clinton investigation;

The shadow cast over our system of justice concerning Secretary Clinton and her involvement in mishandling classified information;

FBI and DOJ’s investigative decisions related to former Secretary Clinton’s email investigation, including the propriety and consequence of immunity deals given to potential Clinton co-conspirators Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, John Bentel and possibly others;

The apparent failure of DOJ to empanel a grand jury to investigate allegations of mishandling of classified information by Hillary Clinton and her associates;

The Department of State and its employees’ involvement in determining which communications of Secretary Clinton’s and her associates to turn over for public scrutiny;

WikiLeaks disclosures concerning the Clinton Foundation and its potentially unlawful international dealings;

Connections between the Clinton campaign, or the Clinton Foundation, and foreign entities, including those from Russia and Ukraine;

Mr. Comey’s knowledge of the purchase of Uranium One by the company Rosatom, whether the approval of the sale was connected to any donations made to the Clinton Foundation, and what role Secretary Clinton played in the approval of that sale that had national security ramifications;

Disclosures arising from unlawful access to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) computer systems, including inappropriate collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign;

Post-election accusations by the President that he was wiretapped by the previous Administration, and whether Mr. Comey and Ms. Lynch had any knowledge of efforts made by any federal agency to unlawfully monitor communications of then-candidate Trump or his associates;

Selected leaks of classified information related to the unmasking of U.S. person identities incidentally collected upon by the intelligence community, including an assessment of whether anyone in the Obama Administration, including Mr. Comey, Ms. Lynch, Ms. Susan Rice, Ms. Samantha Power, or others, had any knowledge about the “unmasking” of individuals on then candidate-Trump’s campaign team, transition team, or both;

Admitted leaks by Mr. Comey to Columbia University law professor, Daniel Richman, regarding conversations between Mr. Comey and President Trump, how the leaked information was purposefully released to lead to the appointment of a special counsel, and whether any classified information was included in the now infamous “Comey memos”;

Mr. Comey’s and the FBI’s apparent reliance on “Fusion GPS” in its investigation of the Trump campaign, including the company’s creation of a “dossier” of information about Mr. Trump, that dossier’s commission and dissemination in the months before and after the 2016 election, whether the FBI paid anyone connected to the dossier, and the intelligence sources of Fusion GPS or any person or company working for Fusion GPS and its affiliates; and

Any and all potential leaks originated by Mr. Comey and provided to author [and NYT reporter – ed] Michael Schmidt dating back to 1993.

The letter is signed by all 20 Republican members of the committee.

Will John Koskinen, head of the IRS, and his underling Lois Lerner also be investigated soon for crimes and corruption? (See here and here.)

And former DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s involvement with a gang of Pakistani crooks and supporters of Islamic terrorism, who, as IT experts, were given access by Democrats on congressional committees to highly sensitive information? (See our post, A huge political scandal, July 27, 2017.)

Will it be revealed that the Democratic Party is essentially a criminal organization?

To add to the pleasure of the victory, consider how glum must they be feeling, all those princes, emirs, CEOs, diplomats, wheeler-dealers, unscrupulous exploiters of the downtrodden, financiers of mass murderers who gave money to the Clintons – ostensibly to their “charitable” Foundation – in the expectation that a future President Hillary Clinton would reward them with favors. Millions, tens of millions of dollars, down the drain! George Soros, the èminence mauvaise of the whole international Left, poured … what… billions ? into getting the corrupt Clintons back into supreme power. All wasted, George, all wasted now.

The Clinton Foundation will get no more donations. Not much point now in its continuing to exist. It never did give anything worth mentioning to charity. And what need now for Bill and Hillary and Chelsea to jet round the world and live high on the hog – the “good causes” on which the Foundation spent most of its bribe-money?

The Clintons will be out of public life at last. As a former president, Bill and his wife will continue to have Secret Service guards – to her continuing annoyance. The disadvantage of being Someone Important without being important.

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR will no longer be welcome at the White House. Happiness!

And yet more happiness: Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, John Kerry – that bunch of irritating women who have surrounded Barack Obama – will pass into dim obscurity, and their dirty deeds will have to be undone, now that the eight-year long winter of our discontent is changed to glorious summer by this Son of New York.

The Clintons’ corruption is like an infectious disease. Everything they touch becomes as rotten as they are.

Hillary Clinton corrupted the State Department – as well as the FBI and the Department of Justice. And the press.

The Washington Examiner gives a summary account of how the State Department became frantically preoccupied with devising ways to cheat and deceive, in order to support Hillary Clinton’s lies which she concocted to conceal her criminal activity:

High-level State Department officials worked behind the scenes last year in several key ways to ensure the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails inflicted as little damage as possible on the Democratic nominee, according to notes made public by the FBI on Monday.

Patrick Kennedy, State’s undersecretary for management, was at the center of efforts to prevent the FBI from upgrading Benghazi-related emails to a classified level.

Although the State Department quickly denied wrongdoing on the part of Kennedy and dismissed GOP calls for his removal on Monday, themFBI notes prompted fresh scrutiny of the administration’s approach to the Clinton email probe.

The 100 pages of “302s”, or summaries of interviews conducted by theFBI, that were released this week shed light on the quiet push to manipulate the handling of Clinton’s emails amid multiple investigations into her record-keeping.

Outsiders tampered with document reviews

Unnamed people who were given “special appointments” in order to assist career State Department officials with the review of Clinton’s emails raised suspicions among some observers, who called their involvement in the process “abnormal”.

Their employment histories “appeared to create a conflict of interest”, the FBI said. The Freedom of Information Act review process is typically confined to career officials in order to prevent political bias from affecting decisions about which records are withheld or redacted.

Officials manipulated redactions

At least one of the people brought in to work on Clinton’s emails “was possibly involved in the Lois Lerner, Internal Revenue Service situation”, referring to the tax agency’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups ahead of the 2012 election.

Multiple witnesses told the FBI they felt agency leadership circumvented normal procedures when preparing emails, particularly those mentioning Benghazi and Libya, for release to Congress and the public. At least one of the 296 Benghazi-related emails made public last summer was released in full despite the fact that it contained classified information, the FBI said. In other emails, the names of public officials were redacted even though FOIA requirements stipulate that those names should have been released.

Some record-keeping officials said they felt “intimidated” each time they proposed upgrading and redacting part of an email because it was classified. Those officials described the “immense pressure” they felt to avoid classifying anything within the 296 Benghazi documents.

After reviewing the Benghazi-related emails last year, career officials in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs suggested classifying “four or five” of the documents.

However, an unnamed State Department official said he was “frustrated” with the move and instead lobbied the bureau to redact the classified portions of those emails under a different exemption, which is typically used to withhold internal conversations about government decision-making.

Kennedy tried to block classifications

The State Department’s undersecretary for management [Patrick Kennedy] made repeated attempts to convince the FBI not to classify a Benghazi-related email as his agency prepared to hand over hundreds of documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Kennedy offered a “quid pro quo” to the FBI if agents ruled against upgrading one email to the “secret” level.

Actually, that’s badly expressed. Kennedy wanted the FBI agents to downgrade it from the secret level – as the the following makes clear.

An unnamed witness told investigators that Kennedy attempted “to influence the FBI to change its markings” and asked FBI agents if they could “see their way to marking the email unclassified.”

Later, an FBI agent who has since retired offered to “look into the e-mail matter” if Kennedy would agree to approving the FBI’s request to send additional personnel to posts in Iraq.

The FBI said the deal never came to fruition and said in a statement Sunday that the FBI agent who responded favorably to Kennedy’s overtures was no longer with the bureau.

So he or she was fired. Scapegoated. But Patrick Kennedy retains his job!

Some emails disappeared

Clinton’s legal team at first informed the State Department that it had prepared 14 banker boxes of printed emails for production to the government. However, when officials arrived at her lawyer’s office to retrieve the emails, they found only 12 boxes.

“Officials were unsure what happened to the other two boxes,” the FBI wrote.

The 12 boxes that did end up in State Department custody contained 52,455 pages of emails, packed into the boxes “with no folders or known method of organization.”

The idea was, plainly, to make it as difficult, arduous, and time-consuming a task as possible to get them into useful order.

Clinton’s lawyers knew emails contained “Top Secret” intel

Katherine Turner, an attorney at the law firm representing Clinton, told FBI agents in August of last year that she had obtained six laptops from Clinton’s staff, each of which likely contained “Top Secret classified information”.

But at a meeting with agents in her office, Turner “declined to provide consent to search the laptops” and pushed for her clients’ protection of what they considered “privileged communication”.

Ultimately, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two of the aides involved in sorting Clinton’s work-related emails, received immunity deals to turn over their laptops. Those agreements provided for the destruction of those laptops after agents reviewed their contents.

A promise to destroy evidence so there can be no future review of it! Could the criminality of the Obama administration be demonstrated more strikingly?

‘Shadow Government’ tried to stop email releases

A group of high-ranking State Department officials, dubbed the “Shadow Government”by witnesses who spoke to the FBI, pushed to release all 30,000 of Clinton’s emails at the same time, in Jan. 2016, rather than over the course of several months starting in summer 2015. The powerful group met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss how to handle FOIA requests for Clinton’s emails. Regular attendees included Secretary John Kerry’s chief of staff and Kennedy.

“Shadow Government” members argued the release of Clinton’s emails should happen all at once to facilitate “coordination”. The move would have overwhelmed reporters with thousands of email chains and prevented the controversy from lingering over the course of the proposed rolling releases.

Ultimately, the career record-keeping officials won out, and the emails were released in batches stretching from May 2015 to Feb. 2016.

As if “reporters” would have actually reported any wrong-doing! As if they would have done anything voluntarily to spark “controversy”!

President Obama and the Clintons have taken the government of the United States into deep criminality.

Veteran FBI agents say FBI Director James Comey has permanently damaged the bureau’s reputation for uncompromising investigations with his “cowardly” whitewash of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information using an unauthorized private e-mail server.

Feeling the heat from congressional critics, Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, “So if I blew it, they blew it, too.”

But agents say Comey tied investigators’ hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation. “In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews,” said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer-investigations unit.

Instead of going to prosecutors and insisting on using grand jury leverage to compel testimony and seize evidence, Comey allowed immunity for several key witnesses, including potential targets.

The immunity agreements came with outrageous side deals, including preventing agents from searching for any documents on a Dell laptop owned by former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills generated after Jan. 31, 2015, when she communicated with the server administrator who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails.

Comey also agreed to have Mills’ laptop destroyed after the restricted search, denying Congress the chance to look at it and making the FBI an accomplice to the destruction of evidence. Comey’s immunized witnesses nonetheless suffered chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements.

And yet Comey indulged it all. What’s more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a “voluntary” witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation. Clinton’s interview, the culmination of a yearlong investigation, lasted just 3 ½ hours. Despite some 40 bouts of amnesia, she wasn’t called back for questioning; and three days later, Comey cleared her of criminal wrongdoing.

“The FBI has politicized itself, and its reputation will suffer for a long time,” Hughes said. “I hold director Comey responsible.”

Agreed retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello: “Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization.” The accommodations afforded Clinton and her aides are “unprecedented,” Biasello added, “which is another way of saying this outcome was by design”. He called Comey’s decision not to seek charges “cowardly”.

“Each month for 27 years, I received oral and computer admonishments concerning the proper protocol for handling top secret and other classified material, and was informed of the harsh penalties, to include prosecution and incarceration” for mishandling such material, [Biasello] pointed out. “Had myself or my colleagues engaged in behavior of the magnitude of Hillary Clinton, as described by Comey, we would be serving time in Leavenworth.”

Former FBI official I.C. Smith knows a thing or two about Clinton corruption. After working at FBI headquarters as a section chief in the National Security Division, he retired as special agent in charge of the Little Rock, Ark., field office, where he investigated top Clinton fund-raisers for public corruption and even Chinese espionage. “FBI agents upset with Comey’s decision have every reason to feel that way,” Smith said. “Clearly there was a different standard applied to Clinton. I have no doubt resourceful prosecutors and FBI agents could have come up with some charge that she would have been subject to prosecution,” the 25-year veteran added. “What she did is absolutely abhorrent for anyone who has access to classified information.”

What’s needed is a revolt within the FBI. Resignations. Protests. Statements of fact and opinion to those few media who are not subjects of the Clinton imperium and will publish them.

It is not unreasonable for immunity from prosecution to be granted to a lesser offender if that person’s testimony – though self-incriminating – can lead to the successful prosecution of a greater offender.

But in the case of Hillary’ Clinton’s multiple and extremely serious crimes, the granting of immunity to all the most important potential witnesses against her was plainly done IN ORDER TO SAVE HER FROM PROSECUTION.

And the intricate plan was also designed to save her from prosecution IN THE FUTURE. The proof of this is that the offender-witnesses who were granted immunity were also permitted to DESTROY EVIDENCE.

The FBI agreed to destroy two Clinton aides’ laptops after granting them immunity as part of a “side agreement”, according to a letter from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Goodlatte alleges that the FBI promised to destroy the laptops of Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, and Heather Samuelson, an ex-campaign staffer and deputy to Mills, after conducting its search.

Fox News cites unnamed sources in a report saying that the FBI’s search was also limited in scope, in order to “[prevent] the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice.” Investigators could not review documents created after January 31, 2015:

The side deals were agreed to on June 10, less than a month before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency would recommend no charges be brought against Clinton or her staff. Judiciary Committee aides told FoxNews.com that the destruction of the laptops is particularly troubling as it means that the computers could not be used as evidence in future legal proceedings, should new information or circumstances arise.

Committee aides also asked why the FBI and DOJ would enter into a voluntary negotiation to begin with, when the laptops could be obtained condition-free via a subpoena.

The letter also asked why the DOJ agreed to limit their search of the laptops to files before Jan. 31, 2015, which would “give up any opportunity to find evidence related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State”.

Aides expressed shock at the parameter, saying it is especially troubling as Mills and Samuelson already had immunity from the consequences of whatever might be on the laptop.

Goodlatte wrote a scathing series of questions to Lynch on the subject:

Like many things about this case, these new materials raise more questions than answers …

Why did the FBI agree to destroy both Cheryl Mills’s and Heather Samuelson’s laptops after concluding its search? [Emphasis in original.]

Doesn’t the willingness of Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson to have their laptops destroyed by the FBI contradict their claim that the laptops could have been withheld because they contained non-relevant, privileged information? If so, doesn’t that undermine the claim that the side agreements were necessary?

Have these laptops, or the contents of these laptops, in fact been destroyed, thereby making follow-up investigations by the FBI, or Congressional oversight, impossible? …

Why was this time limit necessary when both Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were granted immunity for any potential destruction of evidence charges?

Goodlatte also demanded to know how many classified documents were found on Mills’ and Samuelson’s laptops.

Beth Wilkinson, a D.C.-based lawyer who is married to former Meet The Press host and Clinton donor David Gregory, reportedly negotiated the “side agreements” for the two former aides. Wilkinson has represented four of Clinton’s aides.

Greater self-abasement is no law-enforcement officer capable of than to lay down his honor and self-respect for a powerful criminal.

James Comey will be forever remembered as a man who used his position of trust to do just that.

Loretta Lynch is equally compromised, of course. But who expected anything better of her?

In the case of James Comey, who had a reputation as a man of probity, there is something classically tragic about his fall.

The corrupt Department of Justice (is there a federal agency that has not been corrupted by the Obama administration?) allowed Cheryl Mills, who was an accessory to the criminal acts of Hillary Clinton and was herself therefore under investigation, to act as Hillary Clinton’s lawyer when that infamous liar was questioned by the FBI.

The Clinton gangsters are always up to dirty tricks. And the great machinery of state that is supposed to administer the law lets them get away with it time after time.

The questioning of Crooked Hillary by the FBI, it turns out, was a charade. The fix was in from the start. A little pretense of investigation, a couple of hours chatting, and an announcement would then be made that there was nothing she had done that was criminally wrong.

The FBI’s notes confirm that her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, was among the several lawyers representing Clinton in her FBI interview. Mills was hip-deep in the events at the heart of the FBI’s criminal investigation and was herself a material witness who had previously sat for her own interview. Yet not only was she allowed by the Department of Justice to participate as counsel in Clinton’s interview, her communications with Clinton and other material witnesses also were actively protected by the Department of Justice throughout the criminal and civil investigations.

Typically, the DOJ would look askance where a material witness sought to act as a lawyer for the subject of a federal criminal investigation. In Mills’s case, Justice lawyers went out of their way to accommodate this highly unusual dual-hat role. For those who wonder whether Clinton’s FBI interview was all for show, Mills’s participation as a lawyer should be Exhibit A. …

Mills’s dual role as fact witness and lawyer posed considerable obstacles to uncovering the truth about Clinton’s email scheme. In a civil deposition ordered by a federal judge, Mills frequently invoked the attorney-client privilege to avoid answering questions about Clinton’s email setup. When asked about the email setup and in particular conversations that she might have had with Clinton’s IT specialist, Bryan Pagliano — who invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to avoid testifying — Mills refused to answer, claiming those conversations were privileged attorney-client communication.

Mills’s knowledge of facts learned while serving in a non-legal capacity at the State Department could not possibly be protected by an attorney-client privilege.

To fix that problem, Mills conveniently claimed that she did not know anything about Clinton’s email setup during her tenure at the State Department and only learned of relevant facts in her later capacity as Mrs. Clinton’s personal lawyer. Mills’s implausible claim she was unaware of the nature of Clinton’s email setup during her tenure at State is undermined by documents showing that Mills was deeply involved as chief of staff in resolving questions regarding Clinton’s email use. …

So Mills told one whopper of a lie after another, and everyone involved knew she was lying, and the FBI and the DOJ supported the deception.

Even more specious is Mills’s assertion that certain facts she became aware of as Clinton’s chief of staff — such as why she knew that Clinton had transitioned her email to a clintonemail.com address very early in her tenure — were off-limits because she had “refreshed her recollection” as to those facts during her time representing Clinton in the private sector. Mills could only “refresh” her recollection because she had knowledge of those facts during her tenure as Clinton’s chief of staff, putting those facts well beyond the protection of any privilege.

In fact, she was committing a crime even as she was speaking:

Especially given its criminal investigation into Clinton’s email use, the Department of Justice had every reason to challenge an overbroad assertion of attorney-client privilege by a critical fact witness such as Mills. Indeed, Mills’s very representation of Clinton in the criminal investigation raises question under both legal ethics standards and federal criminal law. 18 U.S.C. 207(a) makes it a crime for any former government employee to communicate with the government on certain matters “in which the person participated personally and substantially while in government”.

… When the FBI interviewers broached the question in her May interview of how the email server was set up, Mills and her lawyer walked out. Clinton and her lawyers had demanded that that topic be off-limits to the FBI because of Mills’s more recent role as Clinton’s lawyer.

Clinton demanded. Mills walked out. Because whatever Mills had done before she was Clinton’s lawyer, now she was Clinton’s lawyer so she had attorney-client privilege. So there!

The FBI gave in. And –

The Justice Department apparently agreed. Department lawyers were reportedly taken aback that their FBI colleague had ventured beyond what was anticipated.

The Department of Justice agreement to limit the scope of a criminal interview based on untested claims of attorney-client privilege is, at the very least, unusual. For the more conspiracy minded, it’s downright outrageous.

Yet it pales in comparison to the conduct of a Department of Justice lawyer in Mills’s civil FOIA deposition. On two occasions in that deposition, a lawyer from the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, which represents the State Department in the FOIA cases, invoked Mrs. Clinton’s personal attorney-client privilege to object to questions about Mills’s knowledge of the email setup. When Mills was asked what Brian Pagliano had told her about the setup of the server, a Department of Justice lawyer objected that those conversations had taken place “during the time that [Mills] was representing Secretary Clinton”.

If such a privilege existed, it certainly was not the place of the Department of Justice to invoke it to protect Mills from testifying.

On the whole, the Department of Justice’s accommodating of Cheryl Mills’s dual-hat role as lawyer and witness is mystifying, and it raises significant conflict of interest issues for the department.

On one hand, DOJ was purportedly investigating Clinton, and perhaps even Mills, for the mishandling of government information, including over 2,000 classified emails. On the other, the same Department of Justice was shielding Mills from accounting for her role in the email scandal. Is it any wonder that the FBI and Department of Justice came to the conclusion that they did?

Hillary’s FBI. Hillary’s Department of Justice. They were allowed to put on a little show to bamboozle the stupid public, but there wasn’t the remotest chance that Hillary herself or Cheryl Mills or Bryan Pagliano or any member of the Clinton gang would be brought to trial or found guilty of anything.

The Clinton gang can imperil national security, put the lives of secret agents at risk, plan and prosecute war in Libya, ignore messages from an ambassador and let him be suffocated to death, sell favors to foreign potentates and tycoons in return for vast sums of money paid to a phony charity for the personal enrichment of the Clintons – and the Obama government will protect them from having to answer for any of it.

And what is more, half the voters of America want to put them in charge of the government and give them supreme command of US military power.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton considered a secret plan created by her then-advisers to foment unrest among Palestinian citizens and spark protests in order to push the Israeli government back to the negotiating table, according to emails released as part of the investigation into the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s private email server.

In a Dec, 18, 2011, email, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering suggested that Clinton consider a plan to restart then-stalled peace negotiations by kickstarting Palestinian demonstrations against Israel.

Pickering described the effort as a potential “game changer in the region”, recommending that the United States undertake a clandestine campaign to generate unrest. …

“What will change the situation is a major effort to use non-violent protests and demonstrations to put peace back in the center of people’s aspirations as well as their thoughts, and use that to influence the political leadership,” Pickering wrote.

“This is far from a sure thing, but far, in my humble view, from hopeless,” he continued. “Women can and ought to be at the center of these demonstrations. Many men and others will denigrate the idea. I don’t and I don’t think that was your message.”

Palestinian women, he noted, are less likely than men to resort to violence.

“It must be all and only women. Why? On the Palestinian side the male culture is to use force,” Pickering wrote, comparing the effort to the protests in Egypt that deposed former leader Hosni Mubarak. “Palestinian men will not for long patiently demonstrate — they will be inclined over time and much too soon to be frustrated and use force. Their male culture comes close to requiring it.”

So Palestinian men, in the “humble” view of this presumptuous man, cannot be expected to demonstrate non-violently because “much too soon” they will use force. Indeed, “their male culture comes close to requiring it”.

And yet he thinks it perfectly possible to put “peace back in the center” of their “aspirations”?

They have shown no sign of wanting peace for 68 years, but if the women can be stirred up to protest against something-or-other, suddenly peace will pop into their minds?

Pickering noted that the administration must keep its role in the demonstration a secret, so as not to aggravate ties with Israel.

And he thought Mossad would never find out that the Obama administration was once again up to its dirty tricks in the land (like its efforts to influence elections, which were not kept secret for long)?

“Most of all the United States, in my view, cannot be seen to have stimulated, encouraged or be the power behindit for reasons you will understand better than anyone,” he wrote, suggesting that the government enlist liberal non-profit groups in Israel. “I believe third parties and a number of NGOs [non-government organizations] on both sides would help.”

Cannot be seen to be doing it, but do it without compunction. Because – you see, Hillary, who will understand this better than anyone – it is for the great good of reviving a non-existent “peace process”, and such high-minded goodness can be allowed to resort to low-down duplicity and subterfuge.

To the Left, the ends always justify the means, though the ends may be unrealistic, and the means predictably foul.

As relations with Israel remained tense, another Clinton confidant, Anne Marie Slaughter, sent a staff-wide email to Clinton staffers recommending that they undertake a “Pledge for Palestine” campaign aimed at convincing US millionaires and billionaires to donate significant portions of their wealth to the Palestinian cause.

The effort, Slaughter wrote in the September 2010 email, could help shame Israel.

“Shame Israel”. There’s a high minded plan.

“Such a campaign among billionaires/multi-millionaires around the world would reflect a strong vote of confidence in the building of a Palestinian state and could offset the ending of the moratorium for Palestinians,” Slaughter wrote. “There would also be a certain shaming effect re Israelis, who would be building settlements in the face of a pledge for peace.”

A pledge, that is, on the part of “millionaires and billionaires” around the world, not the Palestinians.

Slaughter, who described the effort as a “crazy idea”, suggested tapping the “Clinton fundraising network” in order to raise the money needed.

“With even 30 calls to the right people in the Clinton fundraising network it should be possible to generate a substantial enough amount quickly enough to capture the public imagination,” she wrote in the email, which was sent to top Clinton staffers, including Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.

Note the assumption that “the public imagination” is readily stirred for the Palestinians. These plotters round Hillary Clinton, like the whole of the Obama administration, seem to have been marvelously insulated from public opinion.

We have to assume that either these plots were not put into effect, or they were tried and failed. And we can see why Hillary, having such advisers and given such advice on top of being the ideologically twisted being that she is, failed totally as Secretary of State to achieve anything good for her country, but did a great deal of continuing harm.

Hillary Clinton did no good and a lot of harm when she was Secretary of State. The chaos that is Libya is her most notorious “achievement”.

But she did manage to use her position to make a great deal of money.

Now we have nothing against money. On the contrary, unpopular though it apparently is among the moralists of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, global warming “scientists”, and Democratic candidates for high office, we like it.

So it is not the riches of the Clintons we are against. It is how they acquired them.

The Romans used to say, “Pecunia non olet” – money doesn’t stink.

But the Clintons’ money actually does. It stinks of corruption.

The Clintons used the State Department as their own private team of enablers for their artful dodging.

Back when they occupied the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton boasted that Americans “got two for the price of one”. The folks in Ireland have a good sense now what that actually costs.

As Irish businesses were arranging for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to make one of her last official visits to Ireland in December 2012, her husband, Bill, suddenly landed a half-million speaking gig for his foundation on the Emerald Island, according to newly released emails from the conservative group Citizens United that show the business of State and the business of Bill were often intertwined.

A review of Mrs. Clinton’s official travel and the former president’s for-pay speechmaking, in fact, found several instances like Ireland in which the couple passed through the same foreign country — one for government business, the other for profit or charity — within a few short weeks of each other.

We looked into the Clintons’ “charity”. How much of the Clinton Foundation’s revenue goes to charity? And what charities? For answers, put these titles into our search slot: Touched by the Clintons; What needs to be known about the Clintons’ charities; Floating up now from a sewer called Clinton; The great good works and wonky dilemmas of William J. Clinton.

For example, Mr. Clinton gave a speech to a prestigious nonprofit in Sweden for $425,000 in May 2012, and Mrs. Clinton visited the country less than a month later to promote a Clean Air convention. On the same trip, Mr. Clinton made a stop in Denmark to give a paid speech to World Management Limited. Mrs. Clinton visited Denmark the following month for a Green Partnership for Growth event.

In June 2012, Mr. Clinton gave a $450,000 speech to YPY Holdings in France. Less than a month later, Mrs. Clinton was in the country for official business. In August of that year, Mr. Clinton made a trip to Brazil and pocketed $850,000 for two days’ work at two different venues. Mrs. Clinton was in the country two months earlier for a United Nations conference on sustainable development.

The amount Mr. Clinton commanded for speeches seemed to rise after Mrs. Clinton became America’s top diplomat.

Of the 13 speeches for which Mr. Clinton personally collected $500,000 or more each, 11 were while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state, according to federal disclosure records. Others, such as the donation Mr. Clinton scored while in Ireland, went directly to the Clinton Foundation.

State officials on government time also spent a significant amount of time vetting Mr. Clinton’s private activities, raising a question of what benefit taxpayers received in return.

Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle at State, including Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, often were involved in the discussions, emails show.

For instance, Mr. Clinton scheduled a trip to Africa several weeks prior to Mrs. Clinton, on official business to promote the foundation’s charitable works there. The trip was cleared through the State Department, which had to check with its embassies to ensure there would not be any problems.

“Cheryl: our embassies in both Kampala and Pretoria have informed me that they see no/no problems (with their host governments or otherwise) with President Clinton’s visit to Uganda and South Africa two/three weeks before the Secretary,” Johnnie Carson, a State official, wrote to Ms. Mills.

Ms. Mills forwarded the email to Amitabh Desai, a Clinton Foundation official, who replied: “Thanks. I also think we need a talking point for the media who ask about the timing of their trips.”

For paid speeches that presented bad optics, Mr. Clinton would ask the State Department whether the money could be donated to his charity rather than taking it personally.

In June 2012, Mr. Desai wrote an email to Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin, along with other top State Department officials asking whether Mr. Clinton could give a speech in Congo — which included a photo line with past dictators — for $650,000.

“This did not clear our internal vet, but [Mr. Clinton] wants to know what state thinks of it if he took 100% for the foundation,” Mr. Desai wrote.

That same month, Mr. Desai wrote the same group at State a similar email, concerned that a group that invited the former president to give a speech for $200,000, the Luca International Group on behalf of the U.S. China Energy Summit, didn’t check out.

“Would [the State Department] have any concerns about [Mr. Clinton] taking this and directing the proceeds to the Clinton Foundation?” Mr. Desai asked. “Don Walker is concerned about the host and agrees with us it’s strange we can’t get any more information on this host and they have no track records of prior events.”

Mr. Clinton never made those speeches, but it serves as an example of ways Mr. Clinton thought of skirting State Department ethics determinations for foundation gains. The foundation also asked in May whether the State Department would have any concerns about an invitation he received on behalf of North Korea.

“Decline it,” Ms. Mills abruptly wrote to Mr. Desai. But that didn’t stop a follow-up question.

“This came via Tony Rodham [Mrs. Clinton’s brother]. So we would be grateful for any specific concerns that we could share, beyond just saying it would be concerning for [the State Department],” Mr. Desai wrote.

“If he needs more, let him know his wife knows and I am happy to call him secure when he is near a secure line,” Ms. Mills wrote back.

The Ireland trips included a fascinating web of private and public interests.

In 2012, Mrs. Clinton’s final year in office, Irish racing executive JP McManus was looking for a high-profile keynote speaker to help him hand out the All-Ireland Scholarships his charity donates annually at Limerick University. He considered Mr. Clinton to be the perfect choice.

Mr. McManus secured Mr. Clinton’s interest “with the help of friends”. “I got a friend of mine to make an inquiry,” he told the Limerick Leader in an article published Nov. 20, 2012, a few days after Mr. Clinton’s arrival. Mr. McManus’ charity also donated as much as $1 million to the Clinton Foundation, to secure the endeavor, records show.

One of Mr. McManus’ friends is Kieran McLoughlin, CEO of the Ireland Funds, who was set to host Mrs. Clinton as a keynote speaker at one of its events the following month in Belfast. It was Mrs. Clinton’s last trip to a foreign country as secretary of state.

Not only did Mr. McLoughlin attend Mr. Clinton’s speech in Limerick, according to press reports, but in the months prior, Mr. McLoughlin and Mr. McManus also celebrated in Chicago to kick off the Ryder Cup, and in Morocco, where Mr. McManus was honored by the Ireland Funds for his charitable work.

Request for comment from Mr. McManus’ charity went unreturned. A spokeswoman for the Ireland Funds said Mr. McLoughlin attended the Limerick University speech as a guest and had no involvement whatsoever in the organization of the event. The charity did give Mr. McManus a $100,000 grant in 2011 to support the work of the Limerick Enterprise Development Partnership, of which the McManus Foundation is a lead supporter. None of the funding given to Mr. McManus was used to help attract Mr. Clinton to the Limerick event, the spokeswoman said.

(Our emphasis.) So the $1 mllion that Mr. McManus’s charity donated to the Clinton Foundation (ostensibly to go through it to some other charity which the McManus charity could easily have donated to directly) came from a different compartment of Mr. McManus’s charity’s cash box? Money not after all being fungible? So no one is lying?

At the same time Mr. Clinton’s speaking engagement in Ireland was being arranged, Irish interests were pursuing Mrs. Clinton for two other opportunities: an official state visit in December 2012 and a women’s forum in 2014, after she left government.

The web of connections between the Clintons’ public and private interests was complicated throughout the Ireland conversations.

For instance, Ms. Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, was arranging the December 2012 trip for the secretary to speak before the Ireland Fund on behalf of the State Department as part of an official trip. At the same time, though, she also was working for a private firm, Teneo Group, that was involved in the event, emails show.

The Women in Business in Northern Ireland group, seeking to get Mrs. Clinton to speak at a forum in 2014, was simultaneously talking with President Clinton’s foundation about getting more involved in its charitable work.

During those conversations, executives of the women’s business lobby asked a top official of Mr. Clinton’s foundation whether they could arrange to be invited to Mrs. Clinton’s December 2012 trip so they could “share our ambitions” with the secretary.

“Just wondering if you had any more information on the Clintons trip to Ireland,” one executive wrote the foundation. “We would really like to get involved at some level so your help here, if possible, would be great.”

The foundation’s solution? They forwarded the women’s group’s request to Ms. Abedin at the State Department.

Kent Cooper, a former federal election regulator and respected political ethics analyst, said the blurred lines between State and the foundation in the Clinton world validated the axiom that “there are many pockets in a politician’s coat to line”.

“There are the official pockets, the political pockets, in this case the foundation’s pockets and then their own private pocketbooks, and you can see how special interests subtly work all of them with invitations, pressure and money to try to get what they want,” he said.

“There seem to have been no ethical boundaries or double checks on conflicts of interest between the activities of the secretary of state as a government official, the fundraising of a private foundation, the fees of a private consultant, and the personal income of a former government official, that being the former president.”

An article by Sharyl Attkisson at the Daily Signal uncovers deep and shameless corruption in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

It is a shocking story. If it is true – and it certainly rings true – it should not merely put Hillary Clinton out of the running for the presidency, but bring her reputation into such disrepute that the best thing she could do is retire permanently from public life. It should also launch a legal investigation if the Obama DOJ under Eric Holder were not equally corrupt.

Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, a chief officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, was one of the four totally innocent people “disciplined” for unspecified wrong-doing over the Benghazi attack. In other words, they were scapegoated, while those guilty of letting four Americans, including the Ambassador – the high representative of the United States of America – be murdered in Benghazi, have been exonerated by a white-washing Accountability Review Board (ARB).

It is Maxwell who reveals what happened.

His department “was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe”.

On a certain week-end, “confidants” of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (how many is not told) gathered in a basement room where documents were stored, and separated some before handing over a batch to the ARB.

“I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” Maxwell says.

When he arrived … he observed boxes and stacks of documents. A State Department office director, whom Maxwell described as close to Clinton’s top advisers, was there. Though technically she worked for him, he hadn’t been consulted about her weekend assignment.

“She told me, ‘Ray, we are to go through these stacks and pull out anything that might put anybody in the [Near Eastern Affairs] front office or the seventh floor in a bad light’.”

“Seventh floor” was State Department shorthand for then Secretary of State Clinton and her principal advisors.

A few minutes after he arrived, Maxwell says, in walked two high-ranking State Department officials.

They were two more of Hillary Clinton’s “confidants”: Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff and former White House counsel who defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial; and Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, who previously worked on Hillary Clinton’s and then Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.

The two Clinton “confidants” (“conspirators” would be a better word for them) “appeared to check in on the operation and soon left”.

Maxwell “did not feel good” about what was going on, and walked out.

He views the after-hours operation he witnessed in the State Department basement as “an exercise in misdirection”.

In May 2013, when critics questioned the ARB’s investigation as not thorough enough, co-chairmen Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Adm. Mike Mullen responded that “we had unfettered access to everyone and everything including all the documentation we needed.” Maxwell says when he heard that statement, he couldn’t help but wonder if the ARB — perhaps unknowingly — had received from his bureau a scrubbed set of documents with the most damaging material missing.

“Perhaps unknowingly”? Maxwell put that in, but he does not have faith in the ARB.

Maxwell also criticizes the ARB as “anything but independent,” pointing to Mullen’s admission in congressional testimony that he called [Cheryl] Mills to give her inside advice after the ARB interviewed a potential congressional witness.

Smell a rat? The smell of a whole nest of rats is strong enough to bring the exterminators without a call to summon them.

Maxwell also criticizes the ARB for failing to interview key people at the White House, State Department and the CIA, including not only Clinton but Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, who managed department resources in Libya; Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro; and White House National Security Council Director for Libya Ben Fishman.

Those three officials must have been suspected of being honest.

“The ARB inquiry was, at best, a shoddily executed attempt at damage control, both in Foggy Bottom and on Capitol Hill,” Maxwell says.

Maxwell “spent a year on paid administrative leave with no official charge ever levied against him”. He was eventually “cleared of wrong-doing” and reinstated. Soon after that he retired, in November 2013.

Several weeks after he was placed on leave with no formal accusations, Maxwell made an appointment to address his status with a State Department ombudsman.

“She told me, ‘You are taking this all too personally, Raymond. It is not about you’.”

But his reputation had been besmirched. He was being named by the media as a man who had contributed to the disaster of Benghazi.

“I told her that my name is on TV and I’m on administrative leave, it seems like it’s about me. Then she said, ‘You’re not harmed, you’re still getting paid. Don’t watch TV. Take your wife on a cruise. It’s not about you; it’s about Hillary and 2016′.”